The Amistad is a replica of the coastal schooner used to transport slaves from Havana to sugar plantations on the coast of Cuba, built in the Mystic Seaport Museum Shipyard and commissioned in 2000 as the flagship of Connecticut. Its story begins in 1839, when 53 Africans who had been illegally abducted into the slave trade mutinied aboard the ship off the coast of Cuba and gained control from their captors. They spared two Spanish navigators to help sail back to Africa, but the navigators steered east toward Africa by day and north at night, and the vessel eventually ended up off Long Island, where the US Navy seized it and towed it into New London. The surviving Africans were imprisoned as runaway slaves in a country where they did not speak English and became the subject of a prolonged legal battle in which they were charged with piracy and murder. A group of abolitionists took up their cause, and through an interpreter the Africans recounted their kidnapping from West Africa and sale into slavery, which was illegal. On that basis, they were recognized as free citizens of Sierra Leone rather than slaves, and that argument ultimately prevailed after an appeal to the US Supreme Court in 1841. The Africans were eventually returned to their homeland in 1842. Today the ship serves as a floating classroom for the New Haven-based non-profit educational organization Discovering Amistad, which uses the lessons of the Amistad Uprising to advance racial and social justice.